I was issued with an M-1 Visa in 2006 (for the FAA IR) and the US FTO (CRM in Arizona) which I initially signed up with but which failed to deliver the I-20 put some bogus stuff into my record the US immigration database, saying I never completed my training – thus suggesting – in the words of one US immigration police officer – that I learned to fly and not to land 
CRM refused to co-operate and the US authorities said only CRM can sort it out…
So when I last visited the US, in 2008, I got picked up and chucked into an “interrogation facility” for a few hours, before they realised I didn’t really belong there. I did say to the policeman escorting me out of there that they can get onto faa.gov and establish that I completed my training OK, with Chandler Air Service, but he said US Immigration have no access to the internet… Luckily the connecting flight didn’t depart until 5hrs later.
I have today got onto the I-94 website and entered various passport numbers which I had at the time and since, but it says it has no travel info for me.
Could it be that the 2008 visit is now deleted, along with my other details? That would be great because I don’t want this hassle on future visits.
At the top of that page, they state:
View your United States arrival and departure history for the past 5 years
So if your visit from before 5 years ago doesn’t appear there, it would be logical. But I would reckon they don’t ever delete any information from their internal databases. Especially the visa and TSA stuff will probably not just disappear.
Maybe you could write to CBP to ask where you can send some papers from 2008 to sort out your visa status. Or contact the US embassy in the U.K.
I would also be surprised if they ever delete any of that data, given that the goal of many Governments is to gather, keep and analyse as much data about everyone as possible. They would not want everything accessible to the public to limit what the public can see, hide the full capability and also to keep the database sizes somewhat sensible. I would expect the CBP officer at the airport to have access to your entire US travel history – and probably more.
They undoubtedly have it in their database that they’ve already hassled you over it, and the explanations were innocent, so there is no need to hassle you again.
Finners wrote:
I would also be surprised if they ever delete any of that data, given that the goal of many Governments is to gather, keep and analyse as much data about everyone as possible
…and even before the Edward Snowden leaks, you could tell they had a massive dragnet over the Internet. Before the leaks, there was a famous incident of a British youth getting deported at US immigration because of a tweet he had made (the outrage being he said something pretty innocent in English drinking slang, which the US took as a bomb threat). Given that Twitter has really limited direct data on you (especially a few years ago), then the US authorities obviously already had a serious datamining operation going on to link things like Twitter handles to real people in meatspace so to make a match between the tweet and the actual person showing up at the immigration desk.
It’s worth noting that the UK tax authorities (HMRC) also mine social media data to look for anything that might suggest you are, [opens PDF] in their own words, a tax evader (illegal) or avoider (legal).
